I've had some time now to track down others' reviews of "An Anarchist's Story", the BBC's docu-drama on Ethel MacDonald, Secretary of the United Socialist Movement and English-speaking voice of autonomous Barcelona.
Spanish Ayes, by Ilona Amos in both the Scotsman & Scotland on Sunday, provides a basic preview but I would have liked to have seen a more critical review.
David Belcher, for the (Glasgow) Herald, writes some facile rubbish and clearly has no concept of anything outside parliamentary social democracy. In Belcher's piece, Aldred is written off as an "tweed-clad, English, upper-crust anarchist" – he was actually raised by his single mother and his maternal grand-parents; his grandfather was a book-binder and radical Liberal – while he complains that there was not enough of the "influences from Ethel's youthful life…that drove her powerful political beliefs".
Perhaps a more pertinent complaint would be that there was no real analysis of those "powerful political beliefs". At no point did the film challenge the bourgeois and authoritarian left on their lack of real support for the Spanish people. Neither did the film cover MacDonald's speeches against the role of the Communist Party in the defeat of the CNT/FAI. Nor did it treat Ethel's struggle against sexism in the British trade union movement and in particular the Typographical Society…so much time – a full 75 minutes – and so little said!
Fortunately, Phil Miller, the Herald's Arts Correspondent, wrote a somewhat less inane preview piece which stuck to safer ground and just followed the press pack: